Red Star over China (35 page)

Thus far he wasn't boasting about results, either with his
Latin-hua
or his other educational efforts. “The cultural level was so low here it couldn't be made worse, so naturally we've made some progress,” he said. As for the future, he only wanted time. Meanwhile he urged me to concentrate on studying educational methods in the Red Army, where he claimed real revolutionary teaching could be seen.

As I traveled beyond Pao An, toward the Kansu border and the front, I stayed in the rude huts of peasants, slept on their mud
k'ang
(when the luxury of wooden doors was not available), ate their food, and enjoyed their talk. They were all poor people, kind and hospitable. Some of them refused any money from me when they heard I was a “foreign guest.” I remember one old bound-footed peasant woman, with five or six youngsters to feed, who insisted upon killing one of her half-dozen chickens for me.

“We can't have a foreign devil telling people in the outer world that we Reds don't know etiquette,” I overheard her say to one of my companions. I am sure she did not mean to be impolite. She simply knew no other words but “foreign devil” to describe the situation.

I was traveling then with Fu Chin-kuei, a young Communist who had been delegated by the Red Foreign Office to accompany me to the front. Like all the Reds in the rear, Fu was delighted at the prospect of a chance to be with the army, and he looked upon me as a godsend. At the same time he regarded me frankly as an imperialist, and viewed my whole trip with open skepticism. He was unfailingly helpful in every way, however, and before the trip was over we were to become very good friends.

One night at Chou Chia, a village of north Shensi near the Kansu border, Fu and I found quarters in a compound where five or six peasant families lived. A farmer of about forty-five, responsible for six of the fifteen little children who scampered back and forth incessantly, agreed to accommodate us, with ready courtesy. He gave us a clean room with new
felt on the
k'ang,
and provided our animals with corn and straw. He sold us a chicken for twenty cents, and some eggs, but for the room would take nothing. He had been to Yenan and he had seen foreigners before, but none of the other men, women, or children had seen one, and they all now came round diffidently to have a peek. One of the young children burst into frightened tears at the astonishing sight.

After dinner a number of the peasants came into our room, offered me tobacco, and began to talk. They wanted to know what we grew in my country, whether we had corn and millet, horses and cows, and whether we used goat dung for fertilizer. (One peasant asked whether we had chickens, and at this our host sniffed contemptuously. “Where there are men, there must be chickens,” he observed.) Were there rich and poor in my country? Was there a Communist Party and a Red Army?

In return for answering their numerous questions, I asked a few of my own. What did they think of the Red Army? They promptly began to complain about the excessive eating habits of the cavalry's horses. It seemed that when the Red Army University recently moved its cavalry school it had paused in this village for several days, with the result that a big depression had been made in the corn and straw reserves.

“Didn't they pay you for what they bought?” demanded Fu Chinkuei.

“Yes, yes, they paid all right; that isn't the question. We haven't a great amount, you know, only so many
tan
of corn and millet and straw. We have only enough for ourselves and maybe a little more, and we have the winter ahead of us. Will the cooperatives sell us grain next January? That's what we wonder. What can we buy with soviet money? We can't even buy opium!”

This came from a ragged old man who still wore a queue and looked sourly down his wrinkled nose and along the two-foot stem of his bamboo pipe. The younger men grinned when he spoke. Fu admitted they couldn't buy opium, but he said they could buy in the cooperatives anything else they needed.

“Can we now?” demanded our host. “Can we buy a bowl like this one, eh?” And he picked up the cheap red celluloid bowl (Japanese-made, I suspect) which I had brought with me from Sian. Fu confessed that the cooperatives had no red bowls, but said they had plenty of grain, cloth, paraffin, candles, needles, matches, salt—what did they want?

“I hear you can't get more than six feet of cloth per man; now, isn't it so?” demanded one farmer.

Fu wasn't sure; he thought there was plenty of cloth. He resorted to the anti-Japanese argument. “Life is as bitter for us as for you,” he said. “The Red Army is fighting for you, the farmers and workers, to protect you from
the Japanese and the Kuomintang. Suppose you can't always buy all the cloth you want, and you can't get opium, it's a fact you don't pay taxes, isn't it? You don't go in debt to the landlords and lose your house and land, do you? Well, old brother, do you like the White Army better than us, or not?—just answer that question. What does the White Army give you for your crops, eh?”

At this, all complaints appeared to melt away, and opinion was unanimous. “Certainly not, Old Fu, certainly not!” Our host nodded. “If we have to choose, we take the Red Army. A son of mine is in the Red Army, and I sent him there. Does anyone deny that?”

I asked why they preferred the Red Army.

In answer the old man who had sneered at the cooperatives for having no opium gave a heated discourse.

“What happens when the Whites come?” he asked. “They demand such and such amounts of food, and never a word about payment. If we refuse, we are arrested as Communists. If we give it to them we cannot pay the taxes.
In any case
we cannot pay the taxes! What happens then? They take our animals to sell. Last year, when the Red Army was not here and the Whites returned, they took my two mules and my four pigs. These mules were worth $30 each, and the pigs were full grown, worth $2 each. What did they give me?

“
Ai-ya, ai-ya!
They said I owed $80 in taxes and rent, and they allowed me $40 for my stock. They demanded $40 more. Could I get it? I had nothing else for them to steal. They wanted me to sell my daughter; it's a fact! Some of us here had to do that. Those who had no cattle and no daughters went to jail in Pao An, and plenty died from the cold. …”

I asked this old man how much land he had.

“Land?” he croaked. “There is my land,” and he pointed to a hilltop patched with corn and millet and vegetables. It lay just across the stream from our courtyard.

“How much is it worth?”

“Land here isn't worth anything unless it's valley land,” he said. “We can buy a mountain like that for $25. What costs money are mules, goats, pigs, chickens, houses, and tools.”

“Well, how much is your farm worth, for example?”

He still refused to count his land worth anything at all. “You can have the house, my animals and tools for $100—with the mountain thrown in,” he finally estimated.

“And on that you had to pay how much in taxes and rent?”

“Forty dollars a year!”

“That was before the Red Army came?”

“Yes. Now we pay no taxes. But who knows about next year? When
the Reds leave, the Whites come back. One year Red, the next White. When the Whites come they call us Red bandits. When the Reds come they look for counterrevolutionaries.”

“But there is this difference,” a young farmer interposed. “If our neighbors say we have not helped the Whites that satisfies the Reds. But if we have a hundred names of honest men, but no landlord's name, we are still Red bandits to the Whites! Isn't that a fact?”

The old man nodded. He said the last time the White Army was here it had killed a whole family of poor farmers in a village just over the hill. Why? Because the Whites had asked where the Reds were hiding, and this family refused to tell them. “After that we all fled from here, and took our cattle with us. We came back with the Reds.”

“Will you leave next time, if the Whites return?”

“Ai-ya!”
exclaimed an elder with long hair and fine teeth. “This time we will leave, certainly! They will kill us!”

He began to tell of the villagers' crimes. They had joined the Poor People's League, they had voted for the district soviets, they had given information to the Red Army about the White Army's movements, two had sons in the Red Army, and another had two daughters in a nursing school. Were these crimes or not? They could be shot for any one of them, I was assured.

But now a barefoot youth in his teens stepped up, engrossed in the discussion and forgetful of the foreign devil. “You call these things crimes, grandfather? These are patriotic acts! Why do we do them? Isn't it because our Red Army is a poor people's army and fights for our rights?”

He continued enthusiastically: “Did we have a free school in Chou Chia before? Did we ever get news of the world before the Reds brought us wireless electricity? Who told us what the world is like? You say the cooperative has no cloth, but did we ever even have a cooperative before? And how about your farm, wasn't there a big mortgage on it to landlord Wang? My sister starved to death three years ago, but haven't we had plenty to eat since the Reds came? You say it's bitter, but it isn't bitter for us young people if we can learn to read! It isn't bitter for us Young Vanguards when we learn to use a rifle and fight the traitors and Japan!”

This constant reference to Japan and the “traitors” may sound improbable to people who know the ignorance (not indifference) of the mass of the ordinary Chinese peasants concerning Japanese invasions or any other national problems. But I found it constantly recurring, not only in the speech of the Communists but among peasants like these. Red propaganda had made such a wide impression that many of these backward mountaineers believed themselves in imminent danger of being enslaved
by the “Japanese dwarfs”—a specimen of which most of them had yet to see outside Red posters and cartoons.

The youth subsided, out of breath. I looked at Fu Chin-kuei and saw a pleased smirk on his face. Several others present called out in approval, and most of them smiled.

The dialogue went on until nearly nine o'clock, long past bedtime. It interested me chiefly because it took place before Fu Chin-kuei, whom the farmers appeared to hold in no awe as a Red “official.” They seemed to look upon him as one of themselves—and indeed, as a peasant's son, he was.

The last one to leave us was the old man with the queue and most of the complaints. As he went out the door he leaned over and whispered once more to Fu. “Old comrade,” he implored, “is there any opium at Pao An; now, is there any?”

When he had left, Fu turned to me in disgust. “Would you believe it?” he demanded. “That old defile-mother
^*
is chairman of the Poor People's Society here, and still he wants opium. This village needs more educational work.”

A few days northwest of Pao An, on my way to the front, I stopped to visit Wu Ch'i Chen, a soviet “industrial center” of Shensi. Wu Ch'i Chen was remarkable, not for any achievements in industrial science of which Detroit or Manchester need take note, but because it was there at all.

For hundreds of miles around there was only semipastoral country, the people lived in cave houses exactly as their ancestors did millenniums ago, many of the farmers still wore queues braided around their heads, and the horse, the ass, and the camel were the latest thing in communications. Rape oil was used for lighting here, candles were a luxury, electricity was unknown, and foreigners were as rare as Eskimos in Africa.

In this medieval world it was astonishing suddenly to come upon soviet factories, and find machines turning, and a colony of workers busily producing the goods and tools of a Red China.

In Kiangsi the Communists had, despite the lack of a seaport and the handicap of an enemy blockade which cut them off from contact with any big modern industrial base, built up several prosperous industries. They operated China's richest tungsten mines, for example, annually turning out over one million pounds of this precious ore—secretly selling it to General Ch'en Chi-t'ang's Kwangtung tungsten monopoly. In the central soviet printing plant at Kian with its eight hundred workers, many books, magazines, and a “national” paper—the
Red China Daily News—
were published..

In Kiangsi also were weaving plants, textile mills and machine shops. Small industries produced sufficient manufactured goods to supply their simple needs. The Reds claimed to have had a “foreign export trade” of over
$12,000,000 in 1933, most of which was carried on through adventurous southern merchants, who made extraordinary profits by running the Kuomintang blockade. The bulk of manufacturing, however, was by handicraft and home industry, the products of which were sold through production cooperatives.

According to Mao Tse-tung, in September, 1933, the soviets had 1,423 “production and distribution” cooperatives in Kiangsi, all owned and run by the people.
^*
Testimony by League of Nations investigators left little doubt that the Reds were succeeding with this type of collective enterprise—even while they were still fighting for their existence. The Kuomintang was attempting to copy the Red system in parts of the South, but results thus far suggested that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to operate such cooperatives under a strictly
laissez-faire
capitalism.

But in the Northwest I had not expected to find any industry at all. Much greater handicaps faced the Reds here than in the South, for even a small machine industry was almost entirely absent before the soviets were set up. In the whole Northwest, in Shensi, Kansu, Chinghai, Ninghsia and Suiyuan, provinces in area nearly the size of all Europe excluding Russia, the combined machine-industry investment certainly must have been far less than the plant of one big assembly branch of, for instance, the Ford Motor Company.